Freewrite || July 4, 2021

The Beginning Of A Challenge

It doesn’t have to begin on the first of anything

I’m starting a freewrite challenge to get over some fear of writing, editing and publishing that I’ve been encountering lately. It’s sort of like writer’s block, except I have finished pieces that I’m too afraid to push into the world because I’m not sure where to send them, how to promote them, whether they’re even publishable, etc.

It’s one of those starting points for anxiety where you begin thinking at a singular point, but they branch out like some magnificent tree into a billion scenarios. Even now, I find my fingers typing faster and faster to accommodate those branching situations running in the background as I try to center myself back to this free-write session.

It’s like when your computer somehow downloads a virus and it’s slowing processes in the background but you’re just trying to watch a Youtube video in the front and it’s not buffering because your computer is about to die.

Except I’m the computer.

Why freewriting? (And what is it?)

Freewriting is a concept I’ve borrowed from a million sources, so it’s hard to credit one. It’s the idea of just starting to write without planning, organizing. No editing (except perhaps to correct horrid typos) as you go.

Just writing.

To me, freewriting has always been helpful because it’s a way to jot down ideas and get the juices flowing. The model of writing that’s helped is to write first, then edit.

In a way, that model of writing is a tamer version of freewriting, because I’d likely dive into some kind of outline, organize it and go.

Freewriting is an even freer process where you just open the document and start. Let your fingers run free. In my case, at 120 wpm.

My whole goal is to unleash those inhibitions and let my writing flow more freely again. Sure, inhibitions are necessary and have helped me build craft over the years, but too much inhibition or instant editing builds into an anxiety that stops the flow before it even starts.

I think writer’s block is often the worse case scenario coming from that, a full traffic jam.

For me, I’m kind of in the touch-and-go kind of state, and so we’re putting in the traffic measures now before we build towards some eternal city-wide jam.

Pre-emptive.

Free-flowing, no stop, traffic.

Why the fourth?

So theoretically I’ve been thinking of this for a while now. I probably started this though mid-June, thinking that I’d start July 1st.

And then, July 1st, being a Canadian holiday, came and went without me really noticing. Taking the time off was incredibly helpful in terms of relieving the pent up stress from a) writing and also b) my school life, but I think we still need some practice to get back into the gear of writing.

So here I am, July 4th, starting the challenge, because it seems too far to wait to start in August. Besides, August 2021 will be an incredible month for me. All this to say — begin. Just… begin.

But … four

This is despite the fact that I’ve traditionally associated four with bad luck. It’s a common thing in many East Asian traditions, including my own. In Chinese, “four” sounds a lot like death.

So for a considerable amount of my childhood, I avoided the number four like the plague. At 4:44pm every day, I held my breath, pretending not to exist during that moment. I wouldn’t do anything important at :44 of any hour, superstitious that it might lead to a bad outcome.

I’ve since grown out of it because mid-puberty I snapped and started touching all of the taboos as experimentation. Some kids do drugs. Others do dangerous skateboarding stunts to get that adrenaline going. Anxious lil me broke taboos that I used to have. What a truly exciting life I live.

To a degree, that kind of naturally formed exposures that decreased the rituals I had around specific numbers like 4, 13. Considering my family history of OCD and how severely similar symptoms showed up in my siblings and not me, to a degree I reflect on that period of “rebellion” and how something snapped in me to just continually do something so similar to exposure therapy for OCD changed how those genetics ultimately showed up.

That’s a long, ugly, unedited sentence to say — it’s incredible how happenstance, luck and environment can impact genetic and biological influence.

What do I hope to get out of it?

The first priority from freewriting would probably just to open the brain floodgates and let those noodles boil and steam freely. As mentioned, I want to tackle that hesitation that’s been building into terrible internal monologue traffic.

My second goal — or perhaps a byproduct? — is to use freewriting to generate new ideas. Sure, I know this piece had primarily been about freewriting, but examine the various tangents.

Usually, in a piece strictly about a certain topic, I would have edited and discarded them.

In freewriting, these tangents are seen as seeds. They’re the beginning of new ideas.

I’d never even thought about writing a piece about it, but this whole reflection I’ve had on how OCD has shown up in my family vs. how rituals / obsessions to a milder degree had shown up when I was younger is something I’d avoided talking about for the longest time.

Partially because of the stigma of OCD, and doubly so because of how people casually use OCD as a descriptor for being organized. Especially because what I experienced had never met the “threshold” for a diagnosis because it didn’t really impact my day-to-day functioning, so I didn’t want to take up space speaking as someone not directly impacted by it.

I didn’t want the story to be twisted in a way where talking about environmental protective factors that may have changed how genes expressed themselves as behaviour were then mistaken as “cures” for actual OCD, the way that people just slap on “be grateful” as a “solution” for depression.

Summary

In all, I think freewriting will a) open up these idea floodgates again and b) in the process, help me generate ideas and reflections for topics that I didn’t really think could be a whole topic, until I started going off on a tangent about it :)

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and my noodles are clogged. At least my nostrils aren’t, though, so I’m grateful for that. Ps, get an irregular and definitely not daily, weekly or monthly dose of random shower thoughts?

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Imad